Goat Sacrificed for Chicago Cubs Curse

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Forest Preserve police in Cook County, Ill., found a grisly
discovery this week: a decapitated white goat tied to a tree near
the Indian Boundary Golf Course. That was strange enough, but
last Wednesday an unknown man delivered a smelly box addressed to
Tom Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Inside
was a decaying goat's head.

Officials are investigating whether the headless goat is
connected to the goat head delivered to Wrigley Field last week.

Who would send a severed goat head to Wrigley Stadium? A confused
Satanist? An angry mobster trying to send a threat but unable to
find a horse?

No, it is a response to a supposed "Billy Goat" curse that dates
back to 1945 when a man named Bill "Billy Goat" Sianis had a pet
goat (named Murphy) that was refused entry to a Cubs game.
Offended by the affront, according to legend he cursed the club
with the words, "The Cubs ain't gonna win no more!" [ Really?!
15 Craziest Urban Legends Debunked ]

Sure enough, the Cubs lost the next game and have not won a World
Series in over a century despite many fan attempts over the years
to lift the curse (some of them involving goats). While some
regard the curse as merely
a silly superstition, many longtime fans take it very
seriously.

Belief in
the Billy Goat curse set the stage for what happened in 2003
when a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman reached for — and deflected —
a foul ball in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series
that might have been caught by an outfielder.Bartman was widely
blamed for the Cubs' loss by both fans and the news media, and
received harassment and death threats.

In an ESPN documentary film about that incident titled "Catching
Hell," Benjamin Polak, a professor of economics at Yale
University, who analyzed the Cubs' chances of winning at each
stage of the game, points out that Bartman's catch only decreased
the team's chance of winning by 3 percent; far worse errors were
made by the Cubs' players themselves throughout that game. Yet
many players and fans had been looking for
a bad omen, some superstitious sign that their dreams of a
long-awaited victory would be spoiled — and Bartman was it. As
Polak noted, any team of professional athletes should be able to
easily overcome a 3-percent deficit introduced by a random event
like fan interference.

There are countless superstitions involving everything from
spilled salt to black cats to nailing horseshoes over doors,
though few of them involve animal sacrifices. The choice of a
goat in the Cubs curse is ironic, since it is a literal
embodiment of the scapegoat—a goat that in ancient times was
chosen to bear the burdens of villagers' sins, and was then led
out of town never to return (or sacrificed). [ 13
Spooky Superstitions & Traditions Explained ]

Curses, spells, and black magic seem like anachronisms held over
from Salem, Mass., in the 1690s. Surely nobody in 2013 America
believes in such things, right? In fact superstitions are all
around us. Many office and apartment buildings, for example, are
missing a 13th floor, and some airplanes don't have a 13th row.
There's a reason why the Beijing Olympics began at exactly
8:08:08 p.m. local time on 8/8/08: The
number 8 is considered lucky in China, and thus the games
began at the most auspicious time possible.

Superstitions are common in sports and competitions; for example,
some professional tennis players eat exactly the same meals and
stay in the same rooms at the same hotels following a big win.
They think that their success must have something to do with
circumstances beyond their abilities. Poker players will wear the
same "lucky" shirt they were wearing when they hit it big, and so
on.

This is a logical fallacy with a Latin name: post hoc ergo
propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of it"), also
known as faulty causation. The human brain seeks causes, and will
find them even when they don't exist. We did something, then
something bad happened. We did something else, and things were
okay, so what we did the first time must have caused the bad
things to happen.

Superstition and magical thinking come easily to humans; we jump
to conclusions without evidence; our biases and prejudices
influence how we interpret the world. We see faces in
clouds and patterns in events where they do not exist. It
shouldn't be surprising that superstitions have always been with
us. The brain's tendency to find meaningful patterns in both
meaningful and meaningless stimuli is also called patternicity.
In his book "The Believing Brain" (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012),
publisher of "Skeptic" magazine Michael Shermer notes that
evolutionary psychology may help explain our tendency toward
magical thinking. "There was a natural selection for the
cognitive process of assuming that all patterns are real and that
all patternicities represent real and important phenomena. We are
descendants of the primates who most successfully employed
patternicity."

So is the Billy Goat curse real? It might be real in one way:
Curses
sometimes work for the same reason that
placebos sometimes work : because people believe in them.
Confidence and focus are important to athletic success, and if a
player loses confidence for any reason — including a real or
imagined curse — it can affect their performance in very real
ways. Either way, the sooner the Cubs win a championship, the
sooner goats can rest easier.

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer"
science magazine and author of six books including "Scientific
Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries."
His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com.